I tend to cringe when I watch myself being interviewed on TV (or YouTube), but nonetheless, I'll post my latest chat.

Yesterday I did a quick interview with Focus Washington's TechView. I talked about the major policy issues for 2010 and we touched on the mega-merger between Comcast and NBC Universal, which will be the subject of two hearings on Capitol Hill Thursday.

Check the interview out here.

There's also a fair amout of other tech-related material on the site for all of you policy wonks out there.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday sent letters to 30 technology companies seeking information about their human-rights practices in China.

The letters were sent to Apple, Facebook, Skype and Twitter. Durbin, who is chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, also said he will hold a hearing on global Internet freedom next month. He expects Google and administration officials to testify.

The interest in Internet freedom was sparked last month when Google said it was the target of a massive cyber attack originating from China. Google threatened to pull out of China altogether unless the country stops censoring communications.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) will hold a hearing next week to examine China's Internet policy in light of recent cyber attacks aimed at Google and human rights activists.

Dorgan chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights and the development of commercial law in China. The hearing, to be held Wed., Feb. 10, will also address free expression and intellectual property protection.

Internet freedom has drawn renewed attention in past weeks after Google reported being the victim of wide-spread cyber attacks allegedly originating from the country. Google received support from the Obama administration for threatening to leave China if its government does not ease Internet censorship restrictions. Read more...

Today is Groundhog Day, and a coalition of consumer groups, big businesses and a few broadband providers are using the occasion to send a message to the FCC: don't wait another year to change the rules governing access to telephone lines.

The members of the NoChokePoints Coalition have been asking the FCC for years to lower "special access" charges, or the fees smaller phone companies and cell phone carriers to pay to lease access on the major backbone networks operated by AT&T, Verizon and Qwest.

Coalition members, including Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, universities, major banks and corporations say they pay $10 billion a year--or $27 million a day--in overcharges to lease access on the major phone companies' networks. And they say they have to pass those costs onto their customers.

"Every year, the Punxsatawney Phil of special access has seen its shadow as past FCC's have determined not to act," said Maura Corbett, spokeswoman for the coalition. "But with a new FCC, special access will not see its shadow this year, as the Commission has made special access reform a priority."

The FCC has asked for public input about whether the current special access rules are working. Read more...

Another former Google employee has joined the Obama administration.

The Department of Defense last week appointed Sumit Agarwal to the Senior Executive Service. Agarwal was previously head of mobile product management for Google in Mountain View, Calif.

He is now deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for outreach and social media in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense.

That's a muddy title-- and his actual job description is also fairly vague. We'll look into it.

Agarwal is the fourth Googler to join the government's ranks since President Barack Obama took office.

Net neutrality was a hot topic for President Barack Obama's YouTube question-and-answer session today.

Citizens were invited to submit questions for the president on YouTube during and after his State of the Union address last week. Since then, 640,000 votes were cast for 11,000 questions, and YouTube selected a few dozen of the highest-rated questions for Obama to answer during a live interview.

Interestingly, net neutrality was the most-asked-about topic under the Jobs/Economy category.

When asked directly if he believed in a free and open Internet, Obama responded, "I'm a big believer in net neutrality."

“I campaigned on this. I continue to be a strong supporter of it," he continued. "My FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has indicated that he shares the view that we’ve got to keep the Internet open, that we don’t want to create a bunch of gateways that prevent somebody who doesn’t have a lot of money but has a good idea from being able to start their next YouTube or their next Google on the Internet."

"This is something we’re committed to,” he continued. “We’re getting pushback, obviously, from some of the bigger carriers who would like to be able to charge more fees and extract more money from wealthier customers. But we think that runs counter to the whole spirit of openness that has made the Internet such a powerful engine for not only economic growth, but also for the generation of ideas and creativity."

Here's a link of the specific video clip addressing net neutrality (via Free Press.)

Mignon Clyburn is the first to admit she is out of her element in Washington. The daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) learned everything she knows about politics from her father—a “blessing,” she says, as she gets used to her new job at the Federal Communications Commission.

But she has quickly found her footing as the third Democratic Commissioner at the FCC, where she is championing consumer-focused issues. On the national broadband plan, which is due to Congress in March, she is most interested in helping low-income, minority and rural communities get the computers and training they need to adopt broadband.

Her father said that is where her passion lies.

“She almost gets emotional when it comes to rural communities without broadband in it,” he said in an interview. “She’s very consumer-oriented.”

Before she was appointed to be the third Democratic FCC commissioner, she had never been away from home for more than two weeks.

But public service “is in my DNA,” she said. Her father, a former high school history teacher, has served in Congress for 18 years. Her grandparents had been active in their churches for as long as she can remember. (Read last week's profile for more details about her relationship with her father.)

She followed that heritage by single-handedly publishing a weekly newspaper in her hometown that focused on African American issues for 14 years. Her father was her business partner, but she took charge of writing stories, selling advertising, and delivering the copies to mailboxes in her 1992 GMC Jimmy, which still sits in her Charleston driveway.

It's the first cabinet-level department to move a sizable operation entirely to a "cloud computing" platform, a sign that the Obama administration's push for the new technology is slowly catching on.

The Labor Department--and 22 agencies under its umbrella--is now using a cloud system built by Global Computer Enterprises (GCE). The Reston, Va.-based company says its the department's first financial system overhaul in more than 20 years. Outsourcing the department's data storage is part of a seven-year, $50 million contract to revamp its financial management system.

GCE says its "cloud"--the giant servers storing all of the department's financial data on the Internet--is completely secure. Read more...

United States business groups are increasingly worried about Chinese policies designed to prop up “national champions” in China.

New rules issues by the Chinese government are supposed to foster “indigenous innovation” businesses in China that would become national champions of business in China. But U.S. firms fear they will hurt the U.S. economy by excluding foreign companies.

The Chinese policies could have a devastating impact on innovative U.S. industries, including computers, software, telecommunications and green technology, the business groups said in a letter to five cabinet members. They are urging the Obama administration to take action.

The pressure from the business community comes amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China on a range of issues.

China is furious with the U.S. over a $6 billion arms sale to Taiwan that was announced on Friday. That fight comes on top of U.S. criticism of China over a cyberattack on Google that led that company to threaten to pull out of China. Read more...